


Where I Will Always Go

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Getting Back Together, Older Characters, Post-Canon, Post-Trespasser, Reconciliation, Universe Alteration, Wordcount: 5.000-10.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 01:43:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6403573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after Inquisitor Cadash sends him to the Wardens in his Judgment, Thom Rainier pays an old friend a long-awaited visit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where I Will Always Go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thievinghippo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thievinghippo/gifts).



> Months ago, thievinghippo gave me a prompt for the (sexy) reunion between the Inquisitor and a Thom Rainier who was sent to the Wardens. Inexplicably, this happened instead.

*

It was mid-morning and the ship’s deck was a frenzy of activity when the Warden came up from the lower levels of the ship with his hood drawn back and his eyes fixed on the foggy horizon. The man had come on at Hercinia, to much speculation among the crew what a Grey Warden might be doing so far to the East with no business to attract him. He had a particular preference for his solitude, and more than a few of the night watch reported to the first mate that he had came to the deck every night only to watch the waves break on the bow of the ship.

Aiden Thrush hadn’t minded the man’s coming and goings, or even the long and heavy silences that came over him between otherwise regular conversation. If his halting stories were to be believed, the man had been notorious once in his life and a hero several times over after. Aiden believed it. He’d seen plenty himself that left him with as grave a fear of the sea as he had love for it and he knew a man haunted by his ill deeds as well as his good ones. If the Warden had his own demons… well, Aiden thought the Warden a pleasant enough fellow all the same. 

When the Warden came to the deck and pulled back his hood so the thick mist settled like pearls in his beard, it was Aiden who tilted his chin upward in greeting, a long length of rope twisted around his work-rough hands.

“Morning, Ser Warden,” he greeted, and nodded toward the shadows of the city peeping through shrouds of fog. The Warden followed his gaze and said nothing, so Aiden talked to fill the silence. “About time now. Doesn’t look like it just yet, but we’re about quarter of an hour from disembarking.”

“Appreciate the warning.” The Warden tugged at the cuffs of his gloves—bearhide, by the looks of them—and nodded to him curtly, and there was the quiver of a smile behind his silver-streaked beard. “Do you take on new crew in Kirkwall?” 

“The captain doesn’t like to linger in Kirkwall. It’s on to Jader after this, and we’ll take on there.” Aiden grinned and, at a shout from high above, pulled at the rope in his hands. The ship turned, a bell clanging raucously from the bow until the rumbling moan of a horn cut through the mist. Everything happened quickly after that. A sudden jerk brought them to a halt, and Aiden turned toward the dock just in time to see the first mate toss a very small sack of coins to an urchin, who whistled through his forefinger and thumb. Two more urchins appeared with rope. Aiden watched their knotwork carefully and gave a curt nod when it was done.

When he’d tested the last of the knots, he straightened and bowed his head to the Warden once again, who returned the gesture, however curtly.

“Maker give you still water and a sure wind,” said he. It was an old Marcher’s blessing that drew out an old, ill-used accent, but one that was not unfamiliar or unwelcome to Aiden. 

He jerked his head out to the misty docks. “May the Maker bless the errand that takes you here, and that He take you home soon.” 

The Warden’s hands were busy, binding his sword to its scabbard with a leather thong, but they stilled at those words. When he lifted his eyes to Aidan’s, he caught the bitter smile glittering in the greyed depths for no more than half a beat before the Warden laughed. 

“May he bring me home, indeed,” he said, somewhat cryptically, and finished tying his sword with an edge of finality. Then he was gone into the morning fog.

*

It wasn’t difficult to figure out which of the stately houses in Kirkwall belonged to the Inquisitor. The estate at the top of the hill was surrounded by an austere stone wall and the filagree of the gates seemed to echo something of the old Inquisition heraldry. Looking out past the estate’s perimeter to the view of the valley below, Thom thought that it was the kind of place Cadash would like.

To the left of the gates, an oak door with a heavy, bronze knocker was barely shielded by hanging ivy, but he didn’t have the chance to brush the ivy out of the way and lift the knocker before a girl with her dark hair braided around the crown of her head appeared at his side, carrying a few packages over her shoulder.

“Ser Warden,” she greeted as she passed him on her way to the oak door, and Thom realized she was no girl, but a dwarven woman, although a young one. She pushed it open with a smile, but paused when she looked back and found him standing in the same place she’d found him. “Are you here to see the Inquisitor?”

Thom swallowed a sudden lump in his throat. To see the Inquisitor? He hadn’t known that Cadash had retained the title when the Inquisition disbanded, but of all the titles he knew she’d earned over the years, he supposed that Inquisitor suited her best.

“I meant to leave a card,” he attempted, “seeing as I didn’t send word ahead.” 

“Oh, we _hoped_ you might come,” she assured him breathlessly, shrugging her packages onto her other shoulder, as though she was oblivious to the staggering effect her words had on him. “Come along,” she urged, waving for him to follow her into the well-kept garden behind the wall. 

Where the nearby estates had perfectly-manicured rows of flowers, this garden had a purpose, and it was heavy with the scent of herbs growing in sweet-smelling clusters.

When the girl saw him looking, she smiled and explained, “For the herbalists.” She paused just long enough to sniff an Andraste’s Grace by the door. 

When they came inside, Thom pulled the ties holding his sword and scabbard at his hip until they came free. It was a Markham custom to disarm at the door and what little Thom knew of Kirkwall — even the Kirkwall under Varric’s leadership — was reason enough to make himself seem as unthreatening as possible, even to Cadash.

Maybe _especially_ to Cadash.

Cadash had been a regular correspondent of his since he left the Inquisition to undergo the Joining, even those final years when she’d still been Inquisitor, before the qunari invasion and the dismantling of the Inquisition in its wake. For eight years, Cadash had possessed an uncanny sense of where Thom might be found and her weekly letters had never once been delayed. If her love for him was a casualty of his lies, a regret that Thom resolved to carry all his days, at least her friendship had not also been lost.

And so, after all the time passed, after the confidence she shared with him, after they’d put everything behind him, why was it that Thom was anxious _now_ , when he might see her again?  
  
_Coward,_ he chastised himself, shoving his breath out in an impatient huff. Cadash was an old friend, and whatever long-held regrets had haunted him on the way to Kirkwall had no place with him now. Sword and shield were set against the wall in the entrance hall when the dwarf girl appeared at the stairs again. 

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” she assured him. The girl’s dimples gave her an impish look, but she kept her sparkling eyes turned down when she led Thom up the stairs and through the dimly-lit hallway that ended with a heavy, imposing door.

“Through here,” the girl instructed, knocking twice with a closed fist and pushing it open for him. “Inquisitor Cadash, the Warden to see you.” Then she turned smartly and left Thom to stare through the open doorway. 

Cadash stood by a pair of windowed doors that overlooked the far-off view he’d admired while climbing the hill outside her house. She’d only looked over her shoulder before the dwarf girl left them alone together and her face was impassive until her eyes swept upward to his face. Then it warmed into a smile. 

“Thom.”

Thom realized several things instantly. Her face was softer and her hair was sprinkled with white hairs that hadn’t been there before, but something else was different about her. Perhaps it was that she looked far more peaceful than he remembered her when she led the Inquisition. The corners around Cadash’s piercing eyes were creased with laugh lines and, though her hair was still short, her tightly coiled curls were no longer shorn close in a cut appropriate for a warrior. 

She’d traded her armor for a soft linen tunic over leather breeches, dragonbone greaves for well-oiled boots, and her greataxe for the small, ornamental knife at her belt. She wore her left sleeve pinned and her right hand was smooth and bare from the years since her retirement.

“My lady,” said Thom, lowering his eyes at the sight of her. The old, familiar words came to him as easily as if he had never left her side. 

“Don’t be ridiculous, Thom,” Cadash admonished, but there could be no mistaking the open fondness in her tone. “I am no more a lady now than I have ever been.”

“Of course,” Thom agreed, because perhaps she hadn’t noticed that she had become just that. He flicked his eyes up her relaxed form and forgot all the things he’d hoped to tell her when he saw her again: crude jokes that would have made her laugh, or any of countless conversations he’d tucked aside for later. 

His silence didn’t seem to matter, because Cadash crossed her study and laid her hand on his elbow. “I’ve missed you,” she said, leading him to a chair with a kindly, firm grip. 

When he was seated, she pulled her fingers along his the line of arm and rested her hand over his until Thom looked up and met her eyes.

“Come,” she said, smiling as she withdrew to the chair opposite his. “Tell me everything.”

*

“Why did you come back?”

Cadash asked the question Thom dreaded most on the first morning after he arrived at the house in Kirkwall, when they sat down for breakfast on the terrace and she’d finished her first cup of tea. Judging by what had been laid out for the two of them for breakfast, Cadash had evidently warned her household staff that Wardens ate a great deal, though Thom’s appetite had stabilized within the first few years after his Joining. 

Thom choked on his toast and quirked an eyebrow at her. “Andraste’s left tit, Cadash. You never _were_ one for a delicate touch, were you?”

Amusement flittered across Cadash’s face, but her stare was fixed on Thom and he didn’t have the impression she was going to let the question drop the way she had dropped so many of her questions before. Honesty certainly couldn’t hurt him now.

“I wanted to see you again.” There it was: the thing he’d been afraid to tell her, too afraid to die without her knowing. Thom sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest in a poor attempt to protect himself from whatever she might say. 

Cadash made a thoughtful noise and looked out to her garden, but not before Thom saw that her mouth had curved slightly upward. When she looked back to him, he wondered what he would see on her face, but she only nodded toward the pot of tea left on the table, gesturing with her hand.

“Do you mind pouring another cup for me?” 

She watched as he did so, tracing his smallest movement with her eyes, but when Thom set the cup of tea in front of her, Cadash gave him a careful nod in thanks and was quiet once again. It didn’t last long, though. Whatever thoughts had occupied her were gone, because she turned her body back to him. 

“How long do you plan to stay?” 

However long he needed to find the closure he wanted, Thom thought. But eventually he would receive a letter sealed with blue wax and he would be carried away by duty once again. So, he answered, “A fortnight before I expect to hear from Stroud again. Perhaps a month.”

“Long enough, then,” said Cadash, setting down her cup with an air of finality. What it was she decided he didn’t know, because she only said, “I’m glad you’re here, Thom,” before changing the topic entirely.

*

Cadash’s household were all dwarves, Thom realized by the end of the third day. The man in the kitchen, Achen, wore a casteless brand on his right cheek and had been born to a smith caste family in Orzammar before an unspoken scandal had stripped him of his station and sent him fleeing to the surface in the service of the Carta. The gardener was an enterprising cousin of the Inquisition’s Scout Harding, and happened to have a talent with poultices. The girl who’d brought Thom inside from the road was called Bre — this seemed to be a nickname, but Thom had not caught her full name — and had been born to a Carta family, as Cadash had.

“Oh,” said Bre, when Thom remarked on this similarity during an otherwise idle chat in the garden while he honed his sword. “The household are all former Carta, or close enough. I was a runner for the Cadash clan. The Inquisitor is a cousin of mine. Distant, but you know how family is.”

Thom supposed he didn’t really know how family was, seeing as he hadn’t seen his own in years, but that hadn’t really been what Bre was getting to, anyway. He’d known that all of House Cadash had joined the Carta when they’d come to the surface. Cadash had never been coy about who she’d been before the Conclave and the Inquisition, but not what she’d been doing since retiring from the Inquisition.

He cleared his throat and tried not to look at Bre any differently than he had when she’d first come upon him in the street. “I don’t imagine the Dasher took to Cadash interfering with Carta operations.”

Bre looked at him, puzzled. “Would _you_ wish to go against the Inquisitor, Ser Warden?”

“You make a fair point,” admitted Thom grudgingly. Maker, Cadash had always made it seem like her peaceful life in the Free Marches was _mundane_ , at worst. 

“So, what happened?”

“You’ll have to ask Inquisitor Cadash about that.” Bre winked at Thom and clipped a few blooms from the Andraste’s Grace growing in the garden for her arrangement. “It’s a good story, but it’s not mine to tell.”

Thom considered letting it go until Cadash invited him on a turn through the gardens later that same day.

She was self-possessed and calm when she slipped her right arm through the crook of his left and led him through the same gardens she worked in every morning, writing responses to the thick stack of letters that came daily on iridescent black wings. Ravens chattered loudly to one another above their heads, resting off a long trip over the sea they would be asked to repeat once Cadash finished her writing. Perhaps many were simple correspondence with the many contacts and friends she’d retained from her days with the Inquisition, but Thom wasn’t as confident of the simplicity of her life after his conversation with Bre as he’d been before.

“It’s peaceful here,” Thom said to her, stiff from the effort it cost him to resist covering her hand with his own as they walked, just to find out what it might feel like to do it. “I’m not used to that.”

“It was peaceful in Haven, too,” Cadash mused, but her gaze was long with remembering. Thom thought he saw a touch of regret, too, but that didn’t seem right. Cadash had never been one to grieve the things that were past, too sharply aware that there could be no changing them, only living with the consequences. 

She continued, “Skyhold was, too, I suppose. If only I’d been the kind of person who could appreciate it back then.”

“Are you saying you might have been pushing yourself too hard?” Thom’s voice lifted with humor, nudging her lightly with his elbow. Cadash leaned back on his arm, not to stabilize herself, but only to be close to him.

“I was,” she admitted lightly. “It was a different time. I didn’t understand that I was free to enjoy my life. I had different expectations for myself.”

“Instead you’ll expect to challenge the Dasher and live to tell the story.” The words came out sharper than Thom meant them to, a fraught accusation and not a light-hearted remark. Cadash tightened her hand around his arm instead of pulling away and she led him on through the garden while she collected herself.

“Bre,” she finally sighed out, tension rolling down from her shoulders. “She’s always thought that was a far more interesting story than it ever was.”

“That a former Carta operative challenged the Dasher and lived to tell the story? That you might have won? I don’t wonder why she might be impressed,” Thom snorted with unsuppressed laughter, though he didn’t think it was all that humorous. Caitrin— _Cadash_ might have died for her defiance, and would he have even known? She didn’t even blink at the danger she placed herself in, but it rattled Thom.

“It wasn’t actually like that.” Cadash squeezed her hand around Thom’s forearm, as much a bulwark against his spiralling anxiety as anything else. “You see, the Dasher sent me to the Conclave. When I was _recruited_ into the Inquisition, before I was named Inquisitor, he was smart enough to know that I wouldn’t betray them for the Carta. I suppose he thought I was setting up an operation of my own, building a con around the reputation of the Herald of Andraste. Whatever it was he thought, he was hardly surprised that I wasn’t interested in falling back in line when it was all over.”

Thom shuddered out a long sigh, but he didn’t feel any less nervous about her daring. Perhaps she’d smoothed over some of her more jagged edges, grown gentler and nostalgic with age, but she hadn’t really changed at heart. Cadash hadn’t understood why her casual acts of fearlessness terrified him when they were young, and he doubted very much that she understood now they were older, either.

“You don’t even know that it’s remarkable to _want_ what you did. To not want to be part of that. To never think about being what he expected you to be.”

“Oh, I did know that,” she said, pulling him half a step closer toward her. Finally, when they made a left turn at the brightly-blooming bushes at the edge of her garden and started back to the house, Cadash slipped her hand around Thom’s bicep for his attention. 

“You think this was an act of daring.” She pulled her hand down his arm to his wrist, stopping short of taking his hand when he began to protest to hold his attention. Cadash’s face was smiling, but Thom had the impression that she was trying to reassure him. “I was a liability for the Dasher. He expected me to come and take what he had for myself.”

“You wanted something different.”

Cadash hummed quietly in agreement, her head close to resting against Thom’s arm, though neither of them said anything to acknowledge the undeniably intimate closeness between them. “I wanted peace, and I wanted others to have a choice for it, too. You can be sold to the Carta before you’re born, promised to serve a lifetime without a glimpse of another way. I wanted them to know that there _was_ a choice.”

“You were better than you ever gave yourself credit for.” Thom came to a slow stop where the path brought them to her door, feeling more bold than he had in some time. At least, more bold than he’d ever felt with Cadash. He finally turned his whole body toward her. 

“You never answered what happened with the Dasher.”

“Oh, Thom,” Cadash laughed warmly. “Do you want me to say that I threatened him, or that I bested him in a duel? No, nothing that exciting. I paid the Dasher a visit and told him what I wanted.”

Thom’s throat felt dry, but he laughed anyway. Of course that was what she had done, and of course it had turned out. For all her daring, Cadash had always been extraordinarily lucky. Of course. “And he gave it to you.”

“And he was grateful for it,” Cadash beamed up at him, a half-dozen emotions playing on her face as long as she held his gaze. “Would you have done any different, Thom?”

He supposed he might not have done the same, but he didn’t say as much to her. “I’m not going to encourage you,” he said instead with a lofty exhale, but he finally continued, “The Dasher made a wise choice.”

“That’s what I told him, too,” Cadash finished with a triumphant smile.

*

A comfortable rhythm emerged over those next few days. It was dark when Cadash woke, for she was already awake and working in her study when Thom woke with the rising sun and went to the garden for exercise with his sword. He watched her lamplight flicker in the weak light of morning, until she blew it out and came to her window to watch the sun break over the horizon. Breakfast felt more like the reunion of old friends after years, rather than the mere hours since they’d retired to bed after a late night in the library.

Sometimes they’d take meals in the garden, and at least once Thom walked to the harbor with her, half a step behind her while half the city seemed to greet her. In the evenings, when Cadash put aside her quills and quit her pacing, they settled by the fire with a dark wine between them and spoke of things long past. 

“Your household calls you Inquisitor,” Thom remarked on one such evening, when Bre melted out of the room after pouring the wine. 

“Should they call me Comtesse instead, Thom? Or Your Worship?” She crossed her leg over her knee and shot him a sparkling smile that carried an edge to it. Not a warning, only a twinkling reminder of what she had once been. What she still was. “Most of the city calls me Lady Cadash, but if I must have a title, I prefer to keep the one that I earned fairly.”

He looked at the wine in his glass and tried to think what else he might call her now. Once, Thom had the privilege of calling her by her given name, but she’d only been Cadash in the years since then. It didn’t seem to him that it made any more sense for him to resume an old intimacy than it would for her to return to calling him by a dead man’s stolen name. Then again...

“It’s your name,” said he after a longer pause than seemed strictly necessary. “It’s yours to choose and yours to live with.”

“You know a little of something of that, I suppose.” 

“I suppose that I do.”

Thom set aside his glass and looked not at her but at the two of them, sitting peaceably in her library only an arm’s length from the other. It had never been like this for them before he’d left for the Wardens, even amidst the best of times, when she openly loved him and he blissfully ignored his own conscience. Their time had been fraught with lies and the ever-present anxiety of mortal danger, but that had been the life that suited them best. Even when he grew tired of the lies, he’d never entertained the idea that it could be any different for him; he’d only proposed a domestic life with her out of jest. Thom didn’t recall thinking it suited Cadash any more at the time, either. Except now time had given Cadash a center of gravity, a softness and joy in the things she had not come to expect for her life. 

And Thom… well, all his machinations and lies had won him only the certainty of a painful death far under the surface he’d fought and bled for all his life. The part of him that howled and raged for more his entire life thought bitterly that this was what his life could have been like with her if he’d been a better man, an honest man; that the kind of man who could live with his own name and his own sins could also fit into the idyllic life Cadash lived now. And he? He was not that man.

“Cadash, I—”

“Caitrin,” she interrupted with keen stare and a knowing smile at his openly startled expression. “You know quite well what my name is.”

Thom had to tell himself to breathe as she carelessly breached the gulf between them by taking his hand into hers. It was smallest crack in her veneer — and it _was_ a cover, Thom realized, all her softness. It had always been so with Cadash, who kept her true emotions to her chest until she was sure of them; until she could be sure of who she was showing them to.

“Caitrin,” he corrected himself, feeling around the familiar shape of her name with his tongue. Her eyes followed the movement of his face, flicked downward and back up to wait for him. “Cait.”

Oh, Maker, but he was growing old and he was tired of fighting. What was there to lose now?

Cadash pulled him toward her firmly, the strength in her remaining arm no mere echo of past glory, and Thom moved willingly with her. Perhaps he was out of practice on everything else, but this, at the least, was still as familiar as breathing to him. Thom tilted his head up for her when she straddled his lap with the slightest crease of concentration between her brows, and her first kiss was hard and demanding, plush and soft before the flash of teeth sharp on his lips. Cadash — _Caitrin_ — relented only when he was able to pull her over him, but still she leaned in closer. Her chest squared against Thom’s just in time for him to shake off a light-headed daze and trace shaking hands along the contour of her sides. Where her body had once been hardened by war, it was absent yet another layer of armor she’d worn, now taut and smooth and built for the labors of peace. 

Her knees planted into the cushion on either side of his, Caitrin leaned her weight back and withdrew to examine Thom’s face. Closer now, her eyes reflected the dimmest candlelight and brightened to a luminescent glow that searched him. He’d once feared that she might see through all his lies, or discover that he loved her as honestly as a lying man knew how. Now he met that steady gaze, flint-eyed and honest, and waited to see if she’d accept what she found there. 

Evidently satisfied, Caitrin pulled the loose, linen tunic she wore free of her soft leather breeches, but Thom stopped her before she had to struggle to pull it over her head. He lifted the soft fabric so that her warm, brown skin was bared to him, and then it came over her head and landed in a heap on her plush carpet. She surged forward to capture Thom’s mouth in another crushing kiss and loosed the front of his shirt, pulling it up over his head and tucking her face into the sensitive crook of his neck when it was bare to her. Her breath was soft and warm, the rough callouses on her palm enough to send pleasure crackling eagerly down his spine and to the very end of his cock.

At least, it was enough until her hand crept down his belly, feeling along his side, then the hard point of his hipbone. Caitrin was torturously patient in examining every mark and scar, as though she hadn’t known nearly all of them once. His fingers trembled on her bare sides, feeling where old scars of hers had faded into her skin, leaving nothing more than faded marks where he remembered fresh, inflamed wounds and raised skin as it healed. Thom turned his head to speak, but halted when she lifted her face and applied that same explorative approach to the small scar that crossed his lower lip. 

When Thom parted his mouth to expel a shaking sigh, Caitrin shifted her weight back onto his knees and dipped her tongue past his teeth. Thom hardly noticed that her hand was no longer gripping the material of his shirt, but had dipped lower still, until she reached into his breeches and closed her hand around the shaft of his cock.

“Maker—” All his breath came out as one over-eager moan, bucking upward into her hand when she pulled her thumb along the exposed ridge along the head. How long—no, Thom didn’t have the time to dwell on how long it had been since he’d felt a hand other than his own, jerking off for expedience rather than pleasure. The grip she held him in was nowhere as tight, the pace nowhere as brutal as his own. 

When Thom dared to open his eyes, his vision was fogged at the edges and he needed to blink a few times to clearly see her parted mouth and steady expression. Caitrin tipped her head up, bumping her chin against his, swirling the slick lubrication accumulating at the tip of his cock along his length, and Thom felt the electric warning deep in his belly that told him he was rapidly approaching climax.

“Don’t—” he choked, half a beat too late, because sweet, numbing bliss was running lines of fire through his chest and to the ends of his fingers, and he was _coming_ faster than he could think. It seemed to roll over him like waves, and Caitrin kissed him hard to swallow his staccato cries. 

Moments later, when his breath had eased, she was still in his lap, though she had discreetly wiped her sticky hand on his discarded shirt. Caitrin reached up to brush his hair out of his face with the back of her fingers, an unmistakably affectionate gesture that she did not seem to think twice about. No, Thom thought, she had never allowed herself second thoughts about anything she did. Not when she’d sent him to the Wardens and not now that he was back with her. It wasn’t starting over, not really. It was like resuming something set to the side, reliving things etched in muscle memory alone.

“Still with me?” Caitrin leaned back onto his knees and picked up his shirt to mop up the mess he’d made of his stomach. 

“Not for lack of trying on your part,” Thom chuckled between breaths, squeezing her hips eagerly. 

“Already?” She looked up at him, plainly surprised by his enthusiasm, and set the soiled shirt to the side so she could kiss him properly. “Well, I suppose.”

“Cait,” breathed Thom beside the delicate shell of her ear, and he felt the trembling of want that echoed through her in response. “Your library is handsome, but its comforts are—”

“My mistake,” she said with humored delight, her hand rested on the flat of his chest for balance. “How discourteous of me, not thinking of my guest’s comfort.” 

“Don’t tease,” Thom chided, steadying his ragged breathing when she laughed brightly. “Your couch might not be able to withstand anything more rigorous than what we’ve just done.”

“Are you saying I wouldn’t choose my furniture for its durability?” Caitrin shifted her weight back onto her knees, looking him over curiously. “There’s a private passage to my bedchamber.” 

And she swung from his lap, steadying herself with a firm grip on his elbow when she overbalanced and tilted forward. The wall where she walked was bare of all but a small bookshelf, an Orlesian painting that hardly suited her style in this life or the one she’d led before. The few other decorations in the room suggested that someone else, no doubt, had chosen them for her. Thom watched her roll of her hips, the bare curve of her waist, and almost missed the minute twisting motion on a wall torch for quickly tucking himself back into his breeches. Then, Caitrin pushed open a hidden door with a shove of her stronger shoulder into the creaking wood, and swallow a flashing wince of pain. 

They’d spoken of that, too, the persistent ache that threaded through her entire left side, but it seemed to pass quickly this time. Still, Thom was on his feet in an instant before she recovered with an unaltered smile that promised she had no plans to rescind her offer. 

“Well?” Caitrin’s voice lifted through the room, her hand rested on the knob of a wide-open door, as though the choice were his to make. “I’ve heard rumors of Grey Warden stamina and I’d like to find out for myself.”

As if he still needed to decide. Thom followed her into the passage, sweeping up their discarded clothing as he left the warmly lit library. “Who told you that?”

“I commanded a battalion of Wardens once, Thom,” answered Caitrin in a coy, knowing voice as she led him through the darkness with ease that couldn’t be completely attributed to her dwarven predisposition to see in the dark. “There was never a rumor in Skyhold I hadn’t heard half a dozen times. I couldn’t have avoided hearing it if I’d tried.”

The passage came to an abrupt end when Caitrin squeezed his arm and guided his hand to a latch. “It slides open,” she explained gently. “I don’t come this way often.”

“Would it be my business if you did?” Thom felt her shrug at his side and gave the jammed door a small shove. 

A fire burned merrily in the corner fireplace and a pitcher of wine was neatly centered on the corner table by the window. Thom felt his face heat at the faintest idea that they had been _expected_ to come here.

“Cait?” 

She turned over her shoulder and peered up at him with an impish smile. “More to your liking, Ser Warden? I’m sure you’ll find the dwarven-make of the furniture in the bedrooms is superior to the Orlesian design of the library.” 

Thom closed the door to the passageway — disguised in her bookcase, of course — with slightly more force than it needed. Dust fluttered down from the ceiling, but neither of them paid any attention to it. 

Caitrin waited beside the bed for him, pulling him in close when he came within her reach. Thom sat at the edge of the bed so he could be closer to her level and cupped her face in his hands, admiring her faded scars and the faded, graying hairs at her temples. 

“The bed will serve just fine,” he said, tipping his head up to receive her when she bent forward to kiss him. She was patient, drawing him upward into the kiss and curling fingers around his bicep to keep him steady. A hundred other nights flashed through his mind, memories of furtive coupling overlaid with a sense of urgency, before contracting to the exact point of reality where the quill-roughened patches on Caitrin’s fingers traced lightning along his arm. He moaned, his energy returning with a sharp suck of incensed air, and reached to help her out of her breastband.

“I can manage my own clothing,” she whispered, voice catching on the words when the fabric around her chest loosened and the back of Thom’s hands brushed along her sides when he pulled away. Her hand edged along his opened breeches meaningfully. “Would you—?”

Thom hadn’t given a lot of thought to the necessity of her casual dress, that it might be harder for her to dress any other way. He lifted her up and set her gently on the mattress so he could stand and undress himself. She watched at first, but when her hand reached for the leather belt at her waist, Thom stopped her. 

“Let me,” he offered, unhooking the mechanism with unsteady fingers that curled under the waist of her breeches and hesitated, heavy with an unspoken question. Let her decide, Thom thought, searching her face for the hesitation he found himself expecting.

“Thom,” she sighed, seeming to sense the urgency in his question of her willingness. If she didn’t understand, she didn’t let on, but only squeezed her hand over his and said, “Please.”

And that was enough. Thom knelt in front of her, creaking knees pressed into her thick carpets, and undressed her with careful devotion. When her undergarments were pulled away and she was left bare in the flickering light from her fireplace, he sat back on his heels, certain that it could be enough for him. But then Caitrin reached out for him, beckoning him onto the bed before drawing back, leaning back heavily onto her hand to keep herself upright. 

Maker, he’d never made the mistake of thinking her fragile before — who would have? — but Caitrin had nearly died to save Thedas a more times than he knew and never spared a thought for her own safety, leaving that tiresome anxiety to her companions and to him. Thom was momentarily overtaken by an urge to stay for as long as she’d let him, to keep anything from happening to her, before he shoved it away and instead pulled a few pillows forward for her to rest on.

“You’re fretting,” Caitrin laughed lowly, pulling him down toward her as the sound carried through his veins and left shivers in the breathy silence that followed. Unsatisfied with merely having him near her, she locked her legs around his hips and twisted so that Thom found himself blinking up at her painted ceiling with his next breath. Her hand braced on his chest, she bent forward and mouthed at the stretch of bare skin between his neck and shoulder, as if she was determined to continue what they’d started in the library.

“No,” he laughed, sliding an arm around her waist and reversed her roll, pulling her underneath him in a single, smooth movement. Thom pulled one big hand around from her hip to the inside of her thigh, coaxing them apart with a light touch. “You wanted to see what a Warden’s stamina is like?”

“Then show me.” Caitrin’s voice was unwavering, deliberately leaving Thom with no space to doubt in himself, or her hopes with him. 

He took his time edging his fingers along the soft skin of her inner thighs, slick with her need. She squirmed beneath him, breath hitching and her fist closing around the corner of a pillow, but the tension in her thighs melted away with his every touch. He hesitated only once more, just before sliding a finger along her slit, a flash of insecurity that quickly passed. _This_ was something he hadn’t forgotten, no matter how many nights he spent trying not to recall the way her breasts trembled with her every breath, or the blissful tension that rippled upward through her diminutive body. 

His thumb passed over her clit, then back around in an achingly unhurried rhythm that built on itself, faster and then slower. His other hand rested on her hip, came up to cup her breast in his palm, and her hips lifted from the mattress and her hand released the pillow and pulled him down toward her. Caitrin broke under him with an unmistakable cry, which she muffled into his mouth, before falling limply into the pillows. 

Thom gave her the space to catch her breath, knowing from dusty, old memories that she was painfully sensitive in the first few seconds after climax. He left his hand resting on her side and cradled her small face in his palm, waiting for her to ride out the aftershocks. 

When her eyes blinked open, a tiny smile spread over her face. “As talented as I remember, Thom.” She gripped his arm and pulled herself upright, climbing up into his lap. 

He’d given very little thought to himself while preoccupied with her, and it wasn’t until his cock brushed against her bare stomach that he realized just how urgently hard he was. Thom heard his stuttering whimper somewhere beyond the rushing blood in his ears, and his questions for her — whether she needed another moment, if she needed to rest, if he was hurting her — were lost in the instant she pushed down on his shoulder and slid down over his cock. Caitrin’s hand gripped him tightly and her forehead fell against his shoulder, quivering bonelessly in his arms. Slowly, but still she moved, rolling down against him with eagerness.

“Please.” The word was nearly inaudible, felt only in a puff against his neck. 

He didn’t need any more encouragement than that: Thom pulled her close against his chest and rocked upward, falling into the rhythm she set within a few thrusts. She didn’t need to speak again, but neither did he. Her climax came on faster this time, overtaking her only seconds after her fingers pricked into his skin as silent encouragement. It was her clenching around him that pushed him to the edge, and his name whispered near his ear that sent him pitching forward into an orgasm so powerful that his vision blacked out. 

When he blinked open again in the darkness that neither moonlight nor her flickering fire could dispel, she’d collapsed into the soft mattress beneath them.

Thom had been running from this — from _her_ — for so long that he hadn’t known what he would find when he came to Kirkwall. Certainly he hadn’t expected resolution to the years of bitter regret, a thing he’d never dared could be made right. If right was what he could call this: reconciling with Caitrin and resuming a life of atonement in exile without her.

Thom turned his face from the heat of the pillow to the cool air lingering in the room, and Caitrin reached up and pulled his mouth down toward hers. Thom could feel her shifting into the pillows, then her steady warmth pressed into his side, something she’d done every night with Blackwall, but never with Thom Rainier. 

But he’d given that away when he was sent away to undergo the Joining. He closed his eyes and laid a kiss at the crown of her head, smelling sweet herbs and parchment in her curls where she had once smelled of leather and wax. It suited the woman who lived in a comfortable estate in Kirkwall, surrounded by people she loved. A life he once might have shared with her.

“You know I’ll need to leave again.” 

Caitrin lifted her head, turning her face into his side and kissing his hot skin until a shiver rattled through his bones. Her expression was serene, unconcerned with the things that he tortured himself with. “I know you will, Thom. And I know that you may yet die, or I might. You might never come back. I might be lost at sea. You might also return faithfully every year until we’re old and withered, and I'll be waiting.”

Perhaps she was thinking only of the time they had, the time they might yet have, rather than the time they might not. It was just so like her to focus on what was tangible and real rather than to worry as he did about the things beyond their control. Some things wouldn’t change, no matter how long it had been.

Thom tilted her chin up to his and kissed her until she sighed and melted into the space next to him. “I’ll come back,” he promised. “Every chance I have, I’ll come, until the day you turn me away.”

“Don’t be dramatic, Thom,” Caitrin huffed warmly at his side. In the guttering firelight, her old scars faded into her smooth, brown skin as her eyes floated shut. In this light, she was finally at peace. “You’ll always come home to me.” 

Then she shifted one last time to lay bonelessly over his chest, fingers curling around his bicep, just the way two other people had done in another place, another time, another life.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is tagged as a universe alteration since Caitrin frees Thom rather than send him to the Wardens in her worldstate ('What You Leave Behind'). For what it's worth, they live a very happy life together in Kirkwall in that worldstate, adopting prison orphans and casually defying the most criminal and apocalyptic figures in Thedas. But this is fun to contemplate, too :)


End file.
